


Every Marriage a Blessing

by Barkour



Series: that blessed arrangement [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Marriage of Convenience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 18:00:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17626976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Bren never broke. Jester still gets in trouble. Marion Lavorre arranges a beneficial agreement.





	1. Chapter 1

Jester knew precisely how she was to fall in love. This was all in her 10 Step Plan for a Perfect Happily After. The number of steps varied, and sometimes so did their contents, but the general idea was like so:

The Chateau would host one of the Ruby of the Sea’s most fabulous of masquerade balls! Jester, or as we shall call her here, _a beautiful and seductive mystery woman_ , dare we suggest even a duchess or perhaps a princess of far off Tal’Dorei, imagine! Jester in a pretty tiara set with so very many glittering and exotic stones! She’d wear a mask of gleaming red feathers to off-set the blues of her face.

And for once, at last, she would go out, out, out, amongst the laughing noble crowds, to swan in a dress of utmost pouf and hold out her gloved hand in that most languid fashion to be held and pressed and kissed by handsome men who would whisper to themselves, _ah, but who is she? Who is she? This woman, this mysterious creature!_

Oh, and she would have a fan of red feathers, too, and she would flutter it at her décolletage (of course she would have the most daring neckline and bubbly lace to hem it too), and she would break a hundred hearts, and then she would look across the ballroom and see _him_ : the man who would with a single dark-lashed look win her heart forevermore. 

Handsome, yes, he would be gorgeous but not as gorgeous as Jester, and tall, she thought he would have to be at least six feet tall, and an elf—no, a quarter goliath—no, he’d be a tiefling like her only he would be such a collection of dusky pinks—no, he’d have a red beard—no, he was clean-shaven, she couldn’t possibly marry a man with a beard—

Well, the _important_ thing was that when she released the box of pixies onto the crowd and everyone started screaming, he would laugh, and that was how she would know the Traveler had picked him out especially for Jester. 

And _then_ they would marry and make tremendous love and have at least five or six children and he would take her all around the world with him and he would cuddle her close every night and murmur to her how very sexy he found her laugh and also her crooked canine, and they would die at the same time holding each other’s hand after sixty marvelous years, and everyone would cry but agree they had loved each other so very much, and it would be _perfect_.

Then Lord Robert Stuffington ruined everything.

*

She argued “It was only a very funny joke!” in a cute and laughing way, but Mama’s pinched brows and heavy mouth did not ease. That worried look had stuck to Mama’s face all week long.

Jester twisted her hands together. Her tail had tucked around her ankle. She could not see how to make it any better. If Mama frowned too much she might wrinkle.

“Try to stay in your rooms, my sweetest,” said Mama, “I will fix this. You must trust your mother.”

Mama kissed her on the brow. The fragrant notes of her perfume stuck to Jester’s skin. She carried it with her all the way to her rooms, back on the third floor of the Chateau. Paint speckled the walls. Jester worked her hands then got out her paints and started on the floor.

The Traveler suggested she flee. Hadn’t she always longed to see the world? To taste the sea air and to dig her toes into loam? 

“I promised Mama,” said Jester. “And anyway I will bring it up to her too and maybe she can help. But it was just a silly little prank, I don’t understand why he is so angry, he was so eager to show his penis to everyone else in the Chateau.”

The Traveler did not have any particular insight to offer on the subject of men. But he did still think it would be a clever joke, to disappear into the night. Mama would worry, though, and Jester didn’t like to think of how Mama would fret and pick at her horns and maybe forget to do her vocal exercises the proper way without Jester there to cheer her on and clap.

*

A man came from the Empire. He was an Archmage; that, Jester remembered. He’d an unpleasant face. Sometimes when people got very old they showed their personalities in their face. You could see how they liked to smile or how they bit their lips too much, things like that.

 _This_ man had a mouth like a crab’s pinching claw. He visited the Chateau on very rare occasion. Mama did not entertain him personally. Once or twice or maybe even four times Jester had asked what it was this man came to her for and Mama always laughed her tinkling laugh and kissed Jester’s cheek and tweaked her horns and said, “Dusty things, Jester. He likes to talk of dusty things.”

The council was still ruminating on Lord Ronald Something’s recent advertisement campaign in the penny sheets. A demon, loosed in the Chateau! The picture of Jester looked awful. They’d drawn her to look like a ragged little weed of a child, and she was _not_.

The man came the day before the penny sheets. The day after the penny sheets, the council met with Lord Shows-it-all. 

Mama murmured to Jester, “Perhaps it would be best…” then fell silent and pressed two fingers to her lips and looked at Jester with guilt.

“I don’t need to take anything with me,” said Jester. “Not very much. Only my sketchbook and my paints and two dresses and some ribbons and of course some gold, for a carriage.”

A fluting sigh dripped from Mama’s lips. She held her arms out to Jester, and Jester went to her, nestling into that most beloved bosom, those sturdy shoulders. Her mother’s smell surrounded her. The steadily radiating heat of her mother’s skin sank into Jester, and with a sudden longing Jester wished she were that ragged child and she could go to sleep in her mother’s own bed, the bed that wasn’t for work, and in the morning Mama would be there to brush her hair and paint her horns.

“There’s time yet,” Mama said to Jester’s crown. “Jester… There is something I must ask you. And if you do not wish to do it, then I will give you all the gold in the world to see you somewhere safe.”

“What?” asked Jester. “What is it, Mama?”

*

The man from the Empire returned. His name was Trent Ikithon. He brought with him three other, younger men. These were suitors for Jester, who was to be married, if she liked to marry. That was how Mama put it, but Jester knew that man’s face, the sharpness of it, the meanness.

The Chateau had secret walks. The servants used them and so did Jester. She had played years in those passages with the mousing cats and made dear friends of them all. Some of the walks had peep holes, to look out on rooms. Mama’s spies used these peep holes, to bring her secrets and information; and so did Jester. She kept those secrets for herself, though, and for the Traveler, who liked secrets most of all.

A pair of peep holes matched to the portrait of some long dead stuffy elf looking across Mama’s most public salon. The men were all seated in there with Mama, who had put on her most severe clothes and the black draping clothes along her horns. She looked enviously beautiful and edged. Jester’s heart ached for her.

“And these are the men you would bring?” she asked of Ikithon.

He introduced the men to Mama: to Marion Lavorre, who gathered secrets to her that she might dole them to those who would aid her in turn. One of the mousing cats crept unnoticed through the salon.

Jester listened as Ikithon introduced his offerings of aid, but she did so absently. The men all looked so _dour_. Two soldiers, one of them graying and the other with an inward crook to his mouth that suggested to Jester a man with a scowling temperament. The third was a mage in a dark blue uniform. He’d red hair and a cropped beard. Of the three he looked the most boring: he was blank-faced even through his own introduction, and he spoke very little. 

Jester thought perhaps she would run for it. It would be very useful for Mama if Jester should marry an imperial officer, but Jester thought—

Oh, she wanted to fall in _love_. If there was something romantic to the thought of an unexpected marriage, it was wholly spoiled by the smugness of the men gathered together and showing their credentials to Mama. At least the boring one wasn’t showing off, but that was almost worse. 

Did he not want to marry her? thought Jester with some indignation. He hadn’t seen her yet but surely _her_ credentials were enough. She fumed. She _was_ going to run for it. Of course the Traveler had the right idea.

The graying officer made a paternal comment. Mama was unamused. The boring man with the red hair shifted very slightly in his chair. His lashes dropped over his eyes. He did have striking eyelashes. They caught the magicked light with a flicker like copper, turned under the sun.

His eyes met Jester’s eyes. Jester startled. He had such _blue_ eyes. In the walk she put her hands up between them, her fingertips to the skeletal interior wall. She felt her mouth shape an O. The man blinked, almost lazily. Did she imagine that lightest crook of his brow?

“Damn cat!” said the other, young man. Jester’s attention flicked to him. The mousing cat had pounced on his trouser hem. A claw had stuck in the fabric; the cat tore a length of string as it fled. 

Jester glanced again at the mage. He was watching the cat’s retreat. At the very corner of his mouth—he’d such a lean mouth—a deepening in his cheek, like a smile trying to come out. A surprise pricked Jester in her throat. The red of his beard made a shadow against his mouth.

The conversation continued. Jester stepped away from the peep holes. She put her hands to her cheeks. Her tail undulated behind her. She thought of the coarse flecked hairs of his eyebrow, crooking. 

Traveler, she thought, what would he sound like if he laughed?

*

Mama came to her rooms that night. Jester had painted new scrollwork across the ceiling rafters. Her hair had come out of its tail, a faint dark cloud about her face.

“Jester?” asked Mama.

Jester beamed at her. She’d paint on her fingers and her dress. Reds, mostly.

“Yes,” said Jester.

*

His name was Bren Aldric Ermendrud.

“Three names!” she’d said with delight as the cleric announced him. (Jester didn’t much care what the cleric said or how she said it. The Traveler had approved and so as far as Jester cared she was married.)

Bren looked at her with his eyebrows up and said, “Ah—yes?” with something very nearly like caution.

The cleric went on though she spared a pointed squint at Jester. Jester hid her face in her bouquet—lilies and bluebells and a sapphire spray—and whispered, “Three names.” She’d never met someone with three names before.

He was very handsome, she had decided. She hadn’t thought she would like a beard on her husband but then her husband had a beard, and so! Her husband: _hers_. 

Would he love her? She hoped so. She hoped he would love her very much. He looked so _handsome_ standing there with his darkly freckled face and in his high-collared dress uniform and his white gloves that framed her face so perfectly as he bent—his red hair tickled the corners of her eyes—his thumb brushed along her cheekbone—she was dizzy with the woodsmoke smell of him—

He kissed her softly, chastely on her lips. No one had ever kissed her before. And he was hers. His lips were warm. They were so terribly warm. She shivered all over under his kiss. 

Perhaps this wasn’t her 10 Step Plan. Jester was certain she would live happily forever after anyway. Mama would have more clout with the empire and Jester could come and see her whenever she wanted, besides. Lord Rumple Bumple couldn’t stop her. And Bren—

Bren, she thought. Bren, Bren. Mine. Mine.

She giggled against his lips. Bren leaned back. His lips were very near. She thought daringly of leaning forward to kiss him. She was a married woman now. She could do such things.

“Why do you laugh?” asked Bren.

“That’s a secret,” said Jester. “Maybe I’ll tell you later if you ask very, _very_ nicely.”

Her husband blushed. Jester put her arm through his arm. They descended the steps together. Mama was dabbing tears from her eyes. Jester waved at her. 

“Perhaps I will, meine Frau,” murmured Bren; and Jester could have danced. Well, and why shouldn't she? She took her husband's hands in her own and pulled him, startled, startled but willing, with her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A companion piece, from another perspective.

Bren had no hunger for marriage. To marry was to open one’s self up to the probability of betrayal. Smoke lurked at the corner of his eye. A conflagration, remembered. That oldest, cruelest, first betrayal. He did not forget.

If he had wished to marry, he’d need only speak with Ikithon of it so that Ikithon might investigate the person Bren selected. Ikithon had done so for Astrid, that she might have her wife, and for Eodwulf, who had his spouse.

For Bren no such domestic things. If he’d a desire for sexual intimacy, he visited the appropriate businesses. Astrid joked that Bren had married the empire. He smiled thinly every time she told this joke. It was very funny. 

He kept his little house. He used three of the rooms. The rest were for books he no longer needed and for Frumpkin to explore and for the spiders to make their dust-catching webs. He did not want so much for company when he’d Frumpkin under foot and letters now and then with Astrid, Eodwulf, their graduating class.

He went away for long stretches, on imperial business. There were spies to root out and fields to clean. Bren was very good at what he did. He enjoyed it, he supposed. A satisfaction to the moment the billowing columns of smoke turned at last to white, as the fire ran out of things to burn.

Then one late summer Ikithon came to Bren. He was on a job, Bren was, hunting a propagandist whose plays had gained popularity in some of the more northern cities. An alarm sounded in his head: the wire he set around his dirty inn room had tripped. Frumpkin, beneath the bed, looked out with lantern eyes.

Bren made his way to the inn. The innkeeper ignored him. He was one of many shady, filthied characters passing through who paid their keep night by night or week by week. He opened the door on that cramped and miserable, flea-fested room. 

Ikithon, standing at the window, did not turn. 

“Report,” said Ikithon.

Bren reported. Ikithon nodded. 

“A good trail. You will contact the nearest agent. I’ve another job for you.”

“How do you mean?”

Ikithon gripped his shoulder. He smiled. Ikithon did not often smile.

“My boy,” he said, “it is time for you to marry.”

*

The Ruby of the Sea had a daughter. Ikithon explained this en route, aboard the hastened carriage. A bastard child of some little magical talent. To Bren this information was new. He didn’t question it. Ikithon kept many cards very close to his chest. 

“She humiliated a local noble,” said Ikithon, with the exact emphasis to suggest how locally important the noble was while also unimportant in the grand scheme of things. “He wants the brat executed, the mother wants her daughter saved, et cetera.” He rolled his hand. “None of that matters. It’s a foot in the door. We can use Lavorre and her network of informants.”

“Ah, and all this out of her motherly instinct,” muttered Bren. “So she will put a spy into the empire’s network in turn.”

“She may think so.”

“You think it worthwhile?”

Ikithon’s eye creased at the corner. He’d that pinched, pleased look again.

“You will handle the girl,” he said.

Bren bowed his head. His left arm itched. He tugged at his gloves. For the Empire, then. He wondered what she would be like, this little spy. The world rolled by in a blur of southerly summer. A sea stink penetrated the carriage. Bren disliked harbors. That was the land-locked farm boy in him.

Scheiße, he thought. He’d have to send to have the house cleaned. The bed was only a narrow cot. The girl would want a proper marriage bed. The skin behind Bren’s ears pricked with sweat.

The carriage jostled. Ikithon slipped a hand into his own coat. He drew out a familiar deck of cards.

“Let’s play a game, eh, Bren?”

*

At the Lavish Chateau, Bren quickly shaved, washed his face, and redressed from the shabbier street clothing to the stiff folds of an officer-mage’s uniform. The fixtures in the Chateau were gilded, the moldings exquisite. It made his skin crawl. Wasteful.

The ploy was simple. Ikithon would present three suitors: an obvious dead goose, a pedigree rose, and Bren. The Ruby would dismiss the goose out of hand, linger on the rose, then select the third option, a man competent but perhaps not so suspect as the rose. Ah, Bren, lucky you, to be competent and plain.

The two officers, he did not know. The older of the two spoke too much and with too much condescension. That was the goose. The younger officer had a clean presentation. His uniform was very new. He wore a gold bead in each earlobe, and his hands were ungloved, his fingers many-ringed. He liked money too much. That was the thorn.

Ikithon spoke sharply and low to the officers. He needn’t speak with Bren, who well understood the part he meant to play. 

Then they were over the threshold; they were in the salon; they were standing before the Ruby of the Sea, Marion Lavorre. She was—Bren held his face blank. He sat as directed on the fourth chair, the farthest from Ikithon and the Ruby, too. 

The beauty of her stuck like a needling knife in the soft, smooth flesh at the small of his back. She was fat and exquisite, a burnished red so like the jewel she claimed. In flowing black cloth and fine gold paint she looked a jewel. 

A little spark of memory. His mother brushed his hair and told him strictly, “A tiefling brings bad luck with them. They don’t mean to do it.”

The Ruby smiled sweetly at Ikithon’s introduction and very nicely greeted each of the men in turn. All the while her eyes burned. A mother’s love. He excised this thought.

Bren’s attention did not so much drift as divide. The room was neatly appointed, not so overdone as the guest’s rooms afforded to each man in his turn. This salon did not mean to impress. This salon had come to do business. Bren relaxed infinitesimally.

Two paintings in the portrait position framed the Ruby’s desk, a great sturdy thing cut of a single block of whitestone ore; this was the most ostentatious item in the whole of the room. Idly Bren calculated the expense of cutting and transporting such an enormous, exotic stone, as he surveyed the two paintings. An elf, old and richly dressed, dominated the single true portrait. Bren looked instead at the other painting, a painting of the Lighthouse of Nicondaras. 

The artist had used a color palette at odds with nature. Yet the violent purples and pinks and reds highlighted the tower, its jut of land, the turbulence of the sea… He had no artistic education. An amateur had surely painted it; the work looked nothing like the grand and formal landscapes that decorated the imperial offices. 

He shifted his weight and glanced to the formal portrait. A precise if stiff likeness with some remarkable accents. The elf’s eyes in particular seemed to shine, as if illuminated by some pale light, or as if each eye were pocked with a little hole.

Bren’s eyebrow crooked. Little spy, he thought, are you there? 

Then the younger officer jumped and swore. A plain tabby cat darted across the floor. A smile, perhaps startled out of him, creased the very corner of Bren’s mouth. String dragged from the cat’s paw, and the officer swore again as he broke it off. The cat had savaged the hem to his trousers.

Casually Bren passed his hand over his mouth. His thumb rubbed the smile out. When he turned his eye to the Ruby, she was looking directly at him. Ah. So she had dismissed the rose. Bren bent his head politely to her.

Her eyes were like banked fires. 

The interview continued.

*

The guests had access to a small but well-edited library. Bren, upon finding it, retreated to its shelves. The vanilla must of thick parchment and the rough texture of a hard cover soothed some perpetual disquiet in his head. 

A few of the books, he had never before held in his hands. He had seen their titles in catalogues, yes, or heard tale of a collector who knew another collector who knew yet another collector who held one of four copies, etc. This expense, he understood. 

Late into the night Bren read in the study. His uniform jacket softened the arm of the chair he’d selected. He’d toed off his shoes at some point, and slowly he’d curled in the chair, with his socked feet up on the opposing chair. 

He heard the delicate tinkling of a chain in the hallway. Bren swung his feet from the chair, his toes into the heels of his shoes as the door opened.

The Ruby of the Sea stood in the doorway to the study. She wore a blue lace gown with dripping sleeves. Her hands braced the door jamb. She looked unblinking at Bren.

“Good evening, Madam Lavorre,” he said.

Very delicately she tipped her head to one side, so a horn dipped. “Good evening, Herr Ermendrud. I would speak with you.” She swept without waiting into the room. The door closed behind her with a quiet snick.

Bren folded the book he held shut over his little finger. He laid the other hand on top of the book. To the Ruby he gave a polite, inquisitive look. 

“I should be glad to help.”

“Very kind of you,” she murmured. She sat in the chair opposite his. The glass orb of light behind her illuminated her horns with wicked edges. Her eyes gleamed. She said, as abruptly as she’d come in, “The Sapphire has chosen you.” She paused there. He said nothing and so the Ruby continued: “Of the three of you, she has decided she likes you best.”

He waited.

“You aren’t surprised?” suggested the Ruby.

“Ah, it is my face.” Bren gestured vaguely. “It is, I do not show much… But I am quite surprised. Yes. And of course pleased.”

The Ruby eyed him narrowly. He thought perhaps Ikithon did not properly appreciate her. The weight of her eyes made the stink of smoke move in his throat. 

In her soft and lovely way, the Ruby said, “My little sapphire, she is dearest to my heart. You have a mother, do you not?”

Bren said, “Yes.”

“Then I’m sure you know what it is for a mother. I want only for my darling girl to know happiness, and security. Will you give her these things?”

Bren weighed his words. The Ruby, smoldering, waited. 

“I will honor the vows I make before God,” he said at last. 

The Ruby leaned forward. Her jewelry made music. 

“Love her,” she pleaded, “before anything else. Before God. Before your empire.”

Bren looked steadily at her. Again he picked his words with care.

“I did not come up in wealth. Marriage… This was not something I thought I would have. And so, I will promise you that I will not—not ever disdain what you are giving up.”

Marion Lavorre said, “Love her.”

Bren said, “I will try,” with all seeming sincerity. The Ruby looked satisfied and made to take her leave.

In her parting she said, “Ah. One last thing. If you are ever to hurt her… What an army I will raise, to break you and all that is yours. And please. She is in all ways an innocent. And we do not keep secrets from one another.”

He kept his quiet. She did not want for an answer.

The Ruby smiled. “Good night, Herr Ermendrud. I am interested to see what it is like, having a son.”

*

He met his bride before the wedding, in his guest’s chambers as he dressed. Bren had put on his trousers and a clean undershirt, the buttons undone at his clavicle. He contemplated a shave. In the mirror he watched as the wall opened into darkness. A young woman peeked her head into the room. Their eyes met in the mirror. She smiled so widely and so brightly it seemed her entire face dimpled. She drew in a breath.

Before she spoke, Bren said, his fingers still on his chin, “This is bad luck, I think, if I’m to see you before the wedding.”

She deflated entirely. “But how did you know it was me?” 

If the horns, the tail, and the blue skin hadn’t given her away, the rest of her would. The Ruby of the Sea was an ample woman, lush and alluring with a swell of bosom and thick hips. This woman, younger and shorter, had similar, softer curves, perhaps thicker legs, her arms stronger. 

Bren said, “I see no other sapphires,” very dryly. 

The woman giggled. She slipped into the room and pulled the wall shut behind her. “Well, you caught me! I’m Jester, and I just wanted to say hello, since we’re about to be married and we haven’t even talked to each other before or even stood in the same room, so here I am! We’re in the same room now.”

He was the one caught. She’d closed the distance between them swiftly. The little spy wore a shift and a sparkling house coat on top of it. Her feet were bare. The nails were coated a pearlescent white. She smelled like lilies and tempera paints. 

Bren turned. Jester was at his shoulder and smiling at him. Her eyes were very bright. She’d the same unblinking attentiveness of her mother. 

Jester held a hand to her mouth and whispered, “You’re supposed to say hello to me, too. You give me your hand and you say, ‘Hello, Jester, you are very lovely today,’ and I think that will be a very good way to start out being married to each other. Okay?”

She stuck out her hand. After a moment Bren took it and shook her hand. 

“Hello, Jester,” he said. “You are very lovely today.”

“Oh, shush!” she said, slapping his hand away. “And here I’m not even dressed yet.” Her nose wrinkled with amusement at her own joke. “Well, I should probably go and get dressed, shouldn’t I? Oh, but you didn’t tell me your name!”

“My name?” he repeated blankly. “Do you not already know it?”

“Yes, you’re Bren,” said the little spy, “but you haven’t said any of that to me so I don’t know it yet so you should tell me now.” She tipped her chin up and closed her eyes and even tucked her hands behind her back.

He supposed he ought to have found it all childish. Instead, oddly, he found it…

With her face turned up like that, her pretty, round face with her pretty, round lips, she looked like she was waiting for a kiss. She looked as if no one had ever kissed her and wouldn’t it be so very nice if Bren should kiss her there on her cheek or perhaps her darling mouth.

Charming, he thought. She was charming, for all that she had broken into his room and chattered till she was very nearly leaning into his lap.

“I’m waiting,” she said, sing-song. 

Bren wondered, only for the briefest of moments, what she would do if he gave her that kiss after all.

“My patronym is Ermendrud,” he said firmly, “and you will learn everything else at the wedding.”

Jester pouted. His nape itched. He said, “Please. You’re inviting very bad luck,” playing the part of the religious imperial, and Jester sighed noisily then spun away on her toes. Her tail flashed, a muscular and balancing weight. 

“See you soon, Herr Ermendrud,” said Jester. She was halfway into the wall again, all but her eyes and horns and loosely swaying hair through. Her lashes fluttered dramatically in a pantomime of seduction. Then she was gone, and the wall had closed seamlessly behind her.

Bren remained, thinking. He thought a great deal and he thought it quickly.

Not childish but dangerous. She was very dangerous. So charming, so light, prattling as if she hadn’t the depth for duplicity. He’d nearly believed it. 

Little spy, he thought. He thought it with some admiration.

*

And so with little fanfare he was wed, or rather they were wed. She made some flirtatious remark or other to him, and he felt his skin heat, so inept was he at such things. Jester was coy and lovely and sweet-smelling, the flowers in her bouquet so finely matched to those bound about her horns. 

She pulled him to dance with her and dance he did, though he disliked the steps. She called him flat-footed but she did so laughing, and Bren did not know if she meant to insult him or to tease. Everything before the wedding had gone well enough, or maybe it was how quickly it had all happened that had made him forget what it was he did now.

Once she danced away from him in her flat white shoes to turn about the floor instead with her mother. He watched her dance and thought: it did not matter what he thought. He did this for the empire. He was ever the dutiful son.

Late into the night the reception wore on. He withdrew more and more from the festivities. For Eodwulf such social events were as like games; he was their butterfly and Astrid the hound, Bren the hunting cat. He found a corner and retreated there to think and if not to think then to marshal his wits.

He took with him another glass of sherry. Weak stuff; he’d rather beer. Hid in his corner he watched Jester dancing and laughing and making havoc among the guests. Now and then he saw annoyance on some noble’s face as she spoke with them too loudly and with too much familiarity. Bren might have felt some little tug of empathy for the young woman had he not known it an act.

And if it isn’t an act? he thought; but it must be an act. Whatever yearning and sweet vulnerability he imagined in the dark-lashed look she’d given him over the bouquet, whispering to herself his name… Well, her mother was the most celebrated courtesan of the continent. 

Bren looked away and drained the square glass. As he lowered the glass, looking out the nearest window to the bright-lit evening black, someone sat heavily beside him. 

Jester put her head on his shoulder and sighed and said, “Husband. This is too many people.”

Ah, it was the way in which she said it. Husband. As if it were a thing by which to claim. As if he were a thing to be claimed. A gear of sorts notched into place in his head, and that gear as he imagined it was called Husband.

He’d drunk the sherry but little else. Not enough to mistake the thing that seemed to unfurl inside him as he looked down at her freckled nose and pretty, fat cheeks, and thought with a sort of belated sense of epiphany, _this is my wife_. 

He was not a fool. He knew that she was to be a spy in his house, an invading spider slipping along the threads of Ikithon’s web. Bren’s little spy; his bright-eyed wife. It occurred to him as it had not occurred to him before that he might could enjoy that game.

Her wedding dress was a lacy, creamy off-white affair that went all the way up to her chin. For the reception she had removed only the train. Scores of tiny pearl buttons enclosed the dress all up the front of her. A collar of frothy lace, so very carefully woven it must have cost a hundred gold an inch, licked at her jawbones.

A very hot thing unfurled inside him, yes.

“I am inclined to agree,” said Bren. 

He did not know what to do with his hands or with his arms. She snuggled closer to him. His elbow then his upper arm brushed her cleavage. He did not dare look so low.

She slipped her blue hand down his sleeve. The tendons in his arms tensed. He did not mean to tense them; it was only—

Then her fingers stroked shyly against the back of his gloved hand. He stared at her fingernails. That pearlescent white again, but speckled he saw now with the tiniest flakes of red paint. He had to get away, or she would—

He would—

Bren did not shake her off. He did not stand. He watched as she slipped her fingertips between his knuckles and then his fingers.

“Maybe,” said Jester very quietly, as if she too were suddenly nervous, “we should … go? Upstairs? Together?”

Bren swallowed. He looked across the room from his little enclosed corner. He could see Ikithon, sipping from a glass of champagne. Soon Ikithon would look for him, to smile his triumph.

“Yes,” said Bren. “Maybe… Yes. I think you’re right.”

He turned his hand beneath hers to better clasp it. He stood. He looked to her. Tugging once, he drew Jester to her feet. She was looking up through her lashes at him, not as a coquette would, but as—well. As a newly married young woman might at the man, deserving or not, who had claimed her hand, who held it now in his own. She was a tremendous liar.

“Perhaps you may show me the way,” said Bren.

Jester dimpled. She touched the wall with her hand, and the wall, it opened to her. She led. He followed. Her silver and whitestone earrings glittered with a last dash of light; then they were in the dark, the two of them, in the dark and alone.

*

Marion Lavorre hired three coaches to carry the dowry to Rexxentrum. The new-made Frau Ermendrud brought onto their personal carriage two trunks filled one with dresses and the other with paints, and an exquisitely wrapped package for Herr Ermendrud.

“It’s from Mama,” said Jester breathlessly as she poured into the carriage. Bren found that the carriage, spacious enough for eight men to travel in moderate comfort, was not at all large enough for his bouncing, ruffled wife, who plopped down right beside him and knocked his knees aside. She was in her dress layered as like the fluffy pastries they sold in abundance in the southern marketplaces. Her breasts, scooped up into a bouquet of their own, were pastries themselves. He flushed.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Open it! You have to open it now, let me see.”

“Is it for me or is it for you?”

“Oh, just let me see, please, please, the ribbon is so pretty. Could I keep it? Do you think it would look nice on my horn? Or maybe it would be cutest if I put it on my tail.”

Bren pressed away a smile. He did untie the ribbon to hand to her. Jester happily began weaving it around her right horn. She smelled like vanilla, so near to him. Her dress was a deep, wine-ish red, complementary to the dark blues of his uniform.

Inside the box were three books. Two were new to him, new and very rare. The third he had been reading when Marion Lavorre came to him in the library. He covered the box again. 

“There!” said Jester. “What do you think?”

He drummed two fingers on the package and looked at her. Her eyelashes were dark as they fluttered over her gleaming eyes. She was terribly, dizzyingly near. He breathed in deeply. Yes, very near, and when he brushed the back of his fingernail along the horn her eyebrows made curious arches. 

My little spy, he thought; and he said, daring, teasing, setting out his first piece in the game, “You look delicious, schatzi,” and Jester made such a delighted sound, preening and satisfied, that Bren laughed. The noise she made at _that_ —

Oh, yes. She was dangerous, this wife of his.

**Author's Note:**

> Haven't the brainpower from work to write the long and intense slow-burn this idea deserves. So here's the first of a handful of scattered scenes. There should be a presumed "and then everything went sideways" at the end of this btw.
> 
> WIDOJEST ATE MY BRAIN


End file.
